Bookjacket

Book Jacket Book Jacket DesignDesign

The Challenge Book covers are hard to design and

nice to look at.

An effective book cover manages to catch human’s eye and convey the idea behind the book on one single page.

However, it’s getting even harder: to make a book really hard to forget, designers need to design the cover in a unique, creative and striking way.

Why having a well designed book cover is important?Whether you like it or not, the success of a book is largely judged by its cover!

The Top 5 reasons your book deserves a great cover are:

An attractive cover design visually conveys a book's message and can generate feelings of excitement and anticipation. An engaging cover will create positive feelings and "BUY" emotion.

Your book only has a few seconds to attract reader, retailer and reviewer attention; make sure it's your book they're choosing.

Consumers buy with their eyes, so a well designed cover gives your book more value.

How long do you spend over each book in a store? Readers look at the spine, front cover and back cover before promptly making the decision to buy. All this in only minutes!

A reviewer can appraise a certain number of books at a time and guess what they choose? Books with interesting and well designed covers! These have a much better chance of being actually read by a reviewer.

Tips for having a great book cover:

The cover design should appeal visually to you and your target audience- Who are you selling to? Who is your audience?

The cover design should appropriately reflect the content of your book – for example, if you are publishing a technical book, steer away from designs with a comic focus.

Traditionally, most people spend more time (at least double) reading and looking at the back cover than they spend on the front cover. Therefore, the front of the book must help to grab their attention but it’s what is on the back that will help them make their decision.

Here is the essential information you will need to add to the back cover of your book:

Author's picture & biography; outlining the author’s qualification to write the book

Features and benefits of reading the book

ISBN

Testimonials from someone well respected in the area that you write. (These review "blurbs” really make a big difference). 

Typography

We will discuss type as we get further along in

this project

-but begin thinking about how you will use

type creatively

Use ‘sans serif’ font for display headers and book covers. Serif typefaces are typically used for body text to ease

readability.

Medium

Just don’t overdo it- Its a delicate

balance!

Combine multiple mediums and

styles

Journey through a Design

Uprooting Anger - Eliminating the Emotion that Kills

Journey through a Design

Journey through a Design

Journey through a Design

Journey through a Design

Final Design

Rose Gray

Katie Jochman

Mo Pesely

Tyler Horst

Matt Schadt

Examples to check out: http://www.metzdesign.com/jm_bookport_newest.php

http://www.arismandesign.com/bookcovers/index.htm

http://bookcoversanonymous.blogspot.com/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/14/excellent-book-covers-and-paperbacks/

50 books/50 covers of 2009

http://covers.fwis.com/

Powerpoint Resources:

http://www.slideshare.net/ooteboe/book-covers-1097756